THE THRESHOLD OF THE POSSIBLE
The twentieth century has been
characterized by a culture of "anti-tradition",
of European significance, that has brought to
a "post-Guernica" phase which disclosed the
coordinates of a far from being strict
abstraction aimed at becoming the principle
and verification of an art imbued with
subjectivity and formal concreteness and
eventually led to the wide area of Informal
Art. Informal art has undermined the last
bulwarks of classic Humanism; in other
words, it has broken the outlines of its most
evident pictorial equivalents: form, colour,
balance, proportions and unity of composition.
This "autre" way of painting has immediately
aroused great creative enthusiasm owing to its
possibility of expressing and overcoming a
far-reaching crisis of human values. The spectator
has felt actively involved in rhythms and
spaces imagined as if they were canvases "in
Cinemascope". I mentioned these historical
experiences because I think they belong to the
origin of the research that Livia Carta has
been carrying out in the last few years.
Livia's oils on paper highlight an imagination that opens
on silent suspensions, sets out on the
quivering boundary of the unconscious,
plunges into its fluid mass, to find itself
suddenly in a different world, noiseless,
muffled, teeming with indefinite forms. The
images found at the bottom of one's self,
slowly come afloat to consciousness, stratify in it,
and then passionately express themselves
on its surface. The surrealists too used to
record from the start their germinative forms,
the indistinct surges of the unconscious. Livia Carta is
not a surrealist, and her "picklock" is
found in the integration between the conscious
and unconscious, according to a subtle
balance of values; and this balance is the
result of an intense specification of wavering
impulses, of confused reactions of the mind to
the external world. If every sheet is a silent
struggling of specks and surfaces of colour, a
frantic interweaving of forms or signs in a
space without direction, these forms and these
signs, however, meet and merge in the deep
centre of the painting, which is the nerve-centre
of a profound psychological construction.
Livia has now broken eveng pattern, has
liberated the structure of her vision, has
achieved that emotional contact with nature
which refrains from any preconceived alchemy
of composition and at the same time allows a
rendering in purely pictorial terms, that vary
from moment to moment, from sensation to
sensation, from colour to colour.
The mobility of sign contributes to create
on the paper a mobile, tectonic density, on the
point of chonging its meaning at every
illumination, at every apparition.
Livia Carta catches the "truth" of nature
in a precise moment, that is, in the passage
between the indistinct and the initial
definition of forms, which sometimes look like
shafts engraved on rocks or caves dug into the
woomb of the earth by water, liquefaction and
erosion of layer upon layer of the
underground.
Everything speaks of a beloved geological
universe, of caves and rocks imbued with
imagination and time which become
impregnated with light by means of osmosis.
If it is true that time is a repetition of
istantaneous moments, if the gesture of the
hand does not accept temporal constraints,
except for the flux of inner life, then it means
that time and space are incessantly merged
with the present. And it is in this present
that the tip of the brush, the straining and the
"monotype" pull of colour attack the natural
world, and turn it into fluid substance and
yearning statement of analogies and
phenomena, and the creative act consists in
reanimating inert matter little by little to
present it to our senses as an artistic "body".
l believe that, for Livia, all this means, above
all, taking possession, without pointless
censure, of her own imaginative territory,
where the "inside" and the "outside" coincide,
without bewilderments, in the willful and
unbending gesture of her drawing. It is a
gesture that, at the same time wants to
achieve a dislocation, a shifting from the hazy
area of imagination to the hard and clear-cut
forms of a primary and archetypal world.
Retracing the giddy and unrelenting
movement of the sign, we understand that,
even when it seems to linger over an
experience of "real life", it is actually
integrated into a yearning relationship of
identity with the present. By means of the
profound continuity of the sign that becomes
landscape, of the sign that once magnified
becomes a detail of itself, and of the "whole"
represented by the work, it is able to
communicate the discontinuous, intermittent
turmoil of fleeting moments. The image
without outline that transpires thus becomes
an announced metamorphosis of thought as
well as of matter. The artist makes us feel that
she is standing on the threshold of a door
opening on a field that belongs to "the
possible".
(Marisa Vescovo)
Recent Exhibitions
Art Gallery
Address
Livia Carta Segato
Via Santa Giustina, 113
36057 - Arcugnano (Vicenza) - Italy
tel. ++39-0444-550314
